Raisin Stoltz

Victorine Noël alias Rosine Stoltz around 1850

Rosine Stoltz , also Rosina Stoltz , actually Victoire Noël or Victorine Noël (born January 13, 1815 in Paris; died July 30, 1903 there ) was a French opera singer ( mezzo-soprano ).

Life

Career

childhood and education

As the daughter of the caretaker couple Florentin Noël and Clara Stoll, Victorine grew up in modest circumstances on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris. Even as a child she invented a different story of origin, because her own surname (French Noël = German Christmas) seemed ridiculous. At the same time, she made herself two years older. She claimed that she was born Rosé Niva in Spain on February 13, 1813. Very early on she ended up in Paris, where her mother ran a house on Boulevard du Montparnasse , known throughout the district as la mère Noël .

After the death of her father, Victorine's mother switched to a job at the Paris Opera . This gave her daughter her first contact with the opera world and received musical training at Alexandre-Étienne Chorons Royal Institute for Classical and Religious Music. Choron would later take over the management of the Paris Opera. The coincidence of the date of birth given by her with the date of death of the Count of Berry promised her the gift of his widow, the Countess of Berry, who actually ensured that mother and daughter Noël moved to the more elegant area of Rue du Regard in the 6th arrondissement could move. Countess Berry also financially supported Victorine's singing and theater training.

Early successes

In the 1830s Revolution, the Charon Institute was closed and Victorine dropped out of her vocal training. As early as 1831, through the mediation of another protégé , the Baron Ternaux, she got a job as a chorister at the Théâtre du Parc in Brussels. In this renowned house, the singer appeared in the poetic comedy Les Trois Châteaux and soon afterwards in the Schwank Fille de Dominique under her first stage name Rosine Ternaux. Her path led her through engagements as a second singer in Spa and Antwerp in 1834 to Lille , where she sang her first professional roles. In the same year she returned to the Antwerp Opera. Here she was so successful that the director brought her back to Brussels when he took over the management of the Théâtre du Parc in 1835 .

In the theater, in which she made her debut as a simple chorister less than four years earlier, she was announced as a newly discovered star and now called herself Héloïse Stoltz. The audience gave her an Olympic triumph at the world premiere of Jacques Fromental Halévy's opera La Juive . Her first teacher Choron, now director of the Paris Opera, became aware of his former student, who was celebrated in Brussels as an inspiring comedian as well as an excellent singer.

Opera diva

Rosine Stoltz in costume The favorite

In 1837 Charles-Edmond Duponchel also staged Halévy's La Juive for the Paris Opera and, on the recommendation of the tenor Adolphe Nourrit and on the advice of Charon, cast the lead role with Victorine under her stage name Rosine Stoltz, which she then used exclusively. The overwhelming success in this opera was followed by others in Die Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer and Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber .

In 1840 Rosine Stoltz took over the role of Leonore in The Favorite by Gaetano Donizetti . A little later she sang the title role in Halévy's opera La rein de Chyypre (1841) and Odette in his Charles VI (1843).

In the following ten years, Rosine Stoltz celebrated one success after another at the Paris Opera. She sang the main roles in 14 operas, including the role of Desdemona in Rossini's Otello . The audience and critics were at her feet. Théophile Gautier had no doubt that she occupies a special position among the best operatic forces and praised her as the only lyrical tragedy of her epoch.

Unfortunately, the sheen of her undisputed ability tarnishes the human image of the celebrated singer. Her arrogance and intrigue finally brought her career at the Paris Opera to a sudden and unexpected end, to which a scandal during the performance of the Rossini pasticcio Robert Bruce contributed. In angry arrogance, she offered the royal theater commission to terminate her contract early. The commission accepted the offer and in March 1847 Rosine Stoltz left the most important opera house of the time. From then on, she first gave guest performances at French provincial theaters and in neighboring countries, from 1852 only on the major stages in Western and Southern Europe, as well as North and South America, but kept returning briefly to Paris and then staying in the city's first hotel , the Cosmopolitan in avenue de l'Opéra. She was often a guest of Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha , one of her most ardent admirers, and then resided in Gotha , but without ever appearing in one of the ducal theaters in Gotha and Coburg .

In 1852, 1853, 1855 and 1859 she was personally invited by Don Pedro II , Emperor of Brazil, to perform in the State Theater of Rio de Janeiro. She received an annual salary of up to 400,000 francs. The ruler showed not only purely musical interests. Once at a charity event where Rosine Stoltz sang, he had rose petals sprinkled on the path from the singer's apartment to the theater. She returned to the Paris Opera for a short time in early 1855 to celebrate the role of Fidès, written especially for her, in the opera Le prophète by Meyerbeer, before finally leaving the Paris opera scene.

In 1856 she appeared again temporarily in the Brussels Opera House with the romantic opera Santa Chiara , which Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had created especially for her. Until 1865 she still fulfilled a guest contract at La Scala in Milan , after which she no longer appeared in public.

Private life

Amours and marriages

Her seductive femininity, combined with excessive ambition, childish fantasies and pronounced lies, shaped not only Rosine's career as an opera star, but also her relationship with men. So she always succeeded, also through intrigues, to make connections with the upper class and especially with the nobility . Some of her love affairs became known, for example that with Léon Pillet , the temporary director of the Paris Opera , and with Jean-Gaspard Deburau , the Pierrot des Théâtre des Funambules , for whom she financially enabled his own theater to be furnished. Especially through her connection with Pillet, she was able to eliminate some of her possible rivals, according to soprano Julie Dorus-Gras . The fact that these maneuvers ultimately earned her a bad reputation not only within the theater company but also in public did not bother her.

According to her own statement, she was married three times, which is doubtful. The only thing that is certain is that she married Alphonso Auguste Lescyer, lawyer and administrator of the Théâtre de la Monnaie , on March 2, 1837 in Brussels , from whom she separated again.

In 1872 she published a somewhat vague advertisement in the Gazette musicale that she had married Duke Carlo Raimondo Lesignano di San Marino. But this could not be possible, because a noble family Lesignano never existed according to the very reliable French noble lexicon. In addition, she described herself in the said advertisement quite impudently as Madame la Comtesse Rosina de Ketschendorf, née Marquise d'Altavilla, instead of née Noël, as it would have been true.

In 1878 she announced her third marriage to Don Emanuel Godoy de Bassano, Princeps de la Paz. This marriage is made probable by the actual existence of this princely house, but is nowhere proven.

The son

After Rosine Stoltz left the Paris Opera in 1847, she sold his villa and all the valuable furnishings he had acquired over the years without the knowledge of her lover Léon Pillet after his professional failure at the opera. At the time she was pregnant.

Their son Charles Raymond was born out of wedlock on January 21, 1848, when his father was given a Carl de Ketschendorf, Legation Councilor of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in Paris, 20 years later . But she herself claimed: “Prince Napoléon Bonaparte , who loved me in exile, is his father.” Both versions are unlikely, as Rosine's later life shows.

Baroness von Ketschendorf

Villa Stoltz in Paris 1861

During her abstinence from the Parisian opera world from March 1847, Rosine Stoltz stayed, as already mentioned, often, and as reported for a long time, in Gotha, Thuringia. Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a friend of art and singers, gave her appropriate quarters in a castle-like villa and visited her there, far away from his residence and his wife in Coburg. The popular duke, who had no children in his marriage and had no direct successor, later boasted repeatedly that “he was by no means childless out of wedlock”. In 1856 the Duke honored the revered opera singer with the romantic opera Santa Chiara , which he wrote especially for her and which she embodied on stage in Brussels.

Ketschendorf Castle in Coburg

Rosine Stoltz urged the Duke to ennoble her by virtue of his office, and always put forward the welfare of her son Charles as the reason. She used her repeated short stays in Paris in 1860 to have the architect Pierre-Joseph Olive build an extraordinary house in the Pompeian style, which was acquired by Auguste Hériot in 1874 and demolished by Olympe Hériot in 1882 . Ernst II finally raised her to the nobility in 1865. From then on she was allowed to call herself Baroness von Stolzenau and from 1868 Baroness von Ketschendorf, her son from then Karl Freiherr von Ketschendorf, which probably prompted Ernst II to invent a father of almost the same name.

In the same year, Stoltz received Ketschendorf Castle near Coburg from Ernst II with the associated parkland for 100,000 francs. Once again made possible by Ernst II, she had the castle torn down and rebuilt in the neo-Gothic style according to her ideas and the plans of the Coburg master builder Georg Rothbart . She then resided here for two years and went back to the Hotel Cosmopolite in her hometown Paris.

Age

It seems that in old age she wanted to atone for her innumerable lies and missteps with some senseless benefits. She had converted her considerable fortune into an annual pension of 75,000 francs a month. But she donated almost all of her income to charity to a selection of monks that she had chosen. When she died in 1903, she had no centime and was buried in a poor grave at the expense of the Paris authorities .

Her son Karl von Ketschendorf had died four years before her and his eldest son Ernst died as an English citizen in the Boer War in 1873. The singer's younger grandson, Arkadius, gave up the name of Ketschendorf in 1913 and, as an English citizen, also took the name of Kerry.

It should not go unmentioned that Rosine Stoltz also had her own song compositions published in a collection of ten melodies. According to the criticism, they should have been "not bad".

literature

• Gustave Bord: Rosina Stoltz - de l'academie de musique , published by Henri Daragon, Paris 1909
• Pierre Larousse: Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX. Siecle , Paris 1878
• Mary Ann Smart: The lost voice of Rosine Stoltz , Cambridge Opera Journal, 1994, 6th Edition, pages 31-50
• Otto Friedrich: Ketschendorf
• Arthur Pougin: The Truth About Mme. Stoltz ( L'intermédiaire des chercheurs et des curieux ), No. 1208, LIX edition, 1909
• Fritz Mahnke: Palaces and castles around the Franconian Crown , Neue Presse GmbH printing and publishing company, Coburg, 1974
• Renate Reuther. Villas in Coburg , Coburg 2011 ISBN 978-3-925431-31-9 , pp. 97-106.

Web links

Commons : Rosine Stoltz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Gustave Bord: Rosina Stoltz - de l'academie de musique (French)
• Arthur Pougin: La mystérieuse Madame Stoltz ( Memento of March 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (French)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gustave Bord, Rosina Stoltz , Verlag Henri Daragon, Paris 1909. p. 7
2. ^ Gustave Bord, Rosina Stoltz , Verlag Henri Daragon, Paris 1909. pp. 17–24.
3. ↑ Gustave Bord, Rosina Stoltz , Henri Daragon Verlag, Paris 1909. pp. 26–28.
4. ^ Gustave Bord, Rosina Stoltz , Verlag Henri Daragon, Paris 1909. pp. 42–46.
5. ↑ Gustave Bord, Rosina Stoltz , Verlag Henri Daragon, Paris 1909. P. 55 ff
6. ^ Gustave Bord, Rosina Stoltz , Verlag Henri Daragon, Paris 1909. p. 92
7. ↑ Gustave Bord, Rosina Stoltz , Verlag Henri Daragon, Paris 1909. P. 166 ff
8. ↑ Gustave Bord, Rosina Stoltz , Verlag Henri Daragon, Paris 1909. P. 223 ff